From NatGeo, "While We Sleep, Our Mind Goes on an Amazing Journey"

"But when we’re sleeping, and we commence our first REM session, the most elaborate and complex instrument known in the universe is free to do what it wishes. It self-activates. It dreams. This, one could say, is the playtime of the brain. Some sleep theorists postulate that REM sleep is when we are our most intelligent, insightful, creative, and free. It’s when we truly come alive. “REM sleep may be the thing that makes us the most human, both for what it does for the brain and body, and for the sheer experience of it,” says Michael Perlis.

Maybe, then, we’ve been asking the wrong question about sleep, ever since Aristotle. The real wonder isn’t why we sleep. It’s why, with such an incredible alternative available, do we bother to stay awake?

And the answer might be that we need to attend to the basics of life—the eating and mating and fighting—only to ensure that the body is fully ready for sleep."

Aztec moral philosophy

Life on the Slippery Earth, Aeon (July 3, 2018)

Aztec moral philosophy has profound differences from the Greek tradition, not least its acceptance that nobody is perfect

"A common saying among the Aztecs was that ‘the earth [tlalticpac] is slippery, slick’. Elsewhere, the meaning is clarified: ‘Perhaps at one time, one was of good life; later, he fell into some wrong, as if he had slipped in the mud.’ The Aztecs held, in short, that it’s unrealistic to think that anyone can lead a perfectly good life, one in which you never slip up. A better goal, then, is to try to lead a rooted life, which they called neltiliztli: literally, rootedness. In this kind of life, one is able to manage the mistakes and slip-ups well, rather than avoid them altogether. The reward is not happiness necessarily, but the promise of a worthwhile life."

"The Aztec’s answer is that virtuous actions follow the middle path, they strike the mean."

"Our actions are virtuous, then, when they are aptly expressed. This aptness of expression turns on the circumstances (eg, how formally we should dress), our social position (eg, male or female, commoner or noble), our social role (eg, warrior or physician), and whether we are performing a rite of a specific sort. A memorable example of this last kind concerns drunkenness. Public drunkenness was severely punished in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire; for nobles, the penalty was death. But the elderly at a wedding were not only permitted, but expected to become drunk."

"Finally, the merchant ritual highlights something that has been implicit in my argument so far: namely that the excellence of practical reason or prudence (Greek: phronēsis) was not primarily a quality that individuals possessed. For Aristotle, for example, the phronimos is a rare person who could discern the right means of achieving ends. This explains why Aristotle thought that the best society was a monarchy that was ruled by a single and most wise man. The Aztecs, by contrast, thought that practical reason was best exercised in groups – and one finds evidence for this everywhere, from the merchant rites, to the choice of school for children, to the decisions of the king himself. Moreover, the Aztecs weren’t democratic about the matter. Rather than weigh all advice evenly, they gave greater weight in the deliberative process to those with the most practical experience (ixtlamatiliztli), who were often the elderly. This explains why the leader of the merchants asks the elderly men and women for advice, even though he is thought to be the principle trainer of the young."

"Virtue is thus fostered socially among the Aztecs throughout life. This begins in one’s early childhood, continues through formal education, advances in one’s profession where one is ‘refreshed’ by one’s peers, and is sustained by social rituals. Even the assessment of ‘the middle way’ remains a collective rather than personal effort, since it was believed that practical wisdom worked best in groups that placed a high value on the opinions of the most experienced members. The Aztecs thought all this because they believed that we humans lead lives on the slippery earth (tlaticpac). The best guard we have against this eventuality, then, is each other."

Some interesting things I've read in the first half of 2018

Published this year:  

Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health by Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, July/August 2018.  In Baltimore and other segregated cities, the life-expectancy gap between African-Americans and whites is as much as 20 years. One young woman’s struggle shows why.

Joe and the Whale by Chelsea Murray in The Deep, June 2018.

Jeff Sessions is Killing Civil Rights by Vann Newkirk II in The Atlantic, June 2018.

To Be An Immigrant in Trump's America: A Theory of Animals by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jezebel, June 2018.

The Ultimate Guide to Intermittent Fasting by Katie Heaney, The Cut, June 2018.

Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities by Stanley Fish, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2018.

The Wounds of the Drone Warrior by Eyal Press, New York Times, June 2018.

Today’s Masculinity Is Stifling by Sarah Rich, The Atlantic, June 2018.

Design Thinking Is a Boondoggle by Lee Vinsel in The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2018.

The Ancient Myth of ‘Good Fences’ by Ingrid Rossellini in The New York Times,  May 2018.

The Reinvention of America by James Fallows, The Atlantic, May 2018.

Trump vs. the 'Deep State' by Eric Osnos in The New Yorker, May 2018.

LETTER TO AN ASPIRING INTELLECTUAL by Paul J. Griffiths, First Things, May 2018.

WHY I’M  GIVING UP ON PREVENTATIVE CARE by Barbara Ehrenreich in Literary Hub, April 2018.

Palantir Knows Everything About You by Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, and Jordan Robertson in Bloomberg, April 2018.

James Mattis, A Warrior in Washington by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker, asks "The former Marine Corps general spent four decades on the front lines. How will he lead the Department of Defense?" in March 2018.

McMaster and Commander by Patrick Radden Keefe in The New Yorker, asks "Can a national-security adviser retain his integrity if the President has none?" in April 2018.

Paul Manafort, American Hustler: The Plot Against America, by Franklin Foer in The Atlantic, March 2018.  Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

In Praise of A.D.H.D. by Leonard Mlodinow, New York Times, March 2018.

The Case Against Google by Charles Duhigg, New York Times, February 2018.

How to change the course of human history by David Graeber and David Wengrow in EuroZine, March 2018.

Why a leading political theorist thinks civilization is overrated, interview with Professor James Scott about his new book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Vox.com, April 2018.

Will Robots Set Us Free? by David Moscrop, Boston Review, February 2018.

The Amazing Story of the Russian Defector Who Changed his Mind by Jason Fagone, Washingtonian, February 2018.

Do You Believe Her Now? The Case for Impeaching Clarence Thomas by Jill Abramson, New York, February 2018.

The cult of Mary Beard, by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian, January 2018.

Earlier stuff or re-reads:  

Millenials Are Screwed by Michael Hobbes, Huffington Post, December 2017.

It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read by Charles Chu in Medium.com, August 2017.

Is There Any Point to Protesting? by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker, August 2017.

The Fragile Generation by Jonathan Haidt in Spiked Review, September 2017.

Think Before You Give: Charity Should Be More Rational and Less Emotional by Maarten Boudry, Areo, September 2017.

YOU ARE THE PRODUCT by John Lancaster, London Review of Books, August 2017.

The white flight of Derek Black by Eli Saslow in The Washington Post, October 2016.

The Tyranny of the Ideal interview with philosopher Jerry Gaus in 3:AM, July 2016. 

Aches and Pains by Austin Baraki, Starting Strength, July 2016.

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will by Steven Cave, The Atlantic, June 2016.

Soldiers Have Used Drugs to Enhance Their Killing Capabilities in Basically Every War by Oscar Rickett, writing for Vice News, April 2016.

The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nahesi Coates, The Atlantic, June 2014.

The Things That Carried Him by Chris Jones writing in Esquire, August 2010. Worth reading every Memorial Day.

The Agent (about Ali Soufan) by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, July 2006.  Read this as I was watching the new Hulu mini-series, "The Looming Tower" based on Wright's Pulitzer-winning book about "Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."

Cosmopolitanism: How To Be a Citizen of the World by Julian Brookes in Mother Jones, an interview with Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah in February 2006.

Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are by David McCullough, April 2005.

Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of Genocide by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, historynewsnetwork.org, May 2016.

Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide? by Guenter Lewy, historynewsnetwork.org, September 2004.

1491 by Charles C. Mann in The Atlantic, March 2002. One of my favorite articles of all time. 

 America as a Gun Culture by Richard Hofstadter, American Heritage, October 1970.

Trump vs. the 'Deep State' by Eric Osnos in The New Yorker, May 2018.

Trump vs. the 'Deep State' by Eric Osnos in The New Yorker, May 2018.

"After sixteen months, Trump is on his third national-security adviser and his sixth communications director. Across the government, more than half of the six hundred and fifty-six most critical positions are still unfilled. “We’ve never seen vacancies at this scale,” Max Stier, the president and C.E.O. of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that works to make the government more effective, said. “Not anything close.”

"Some of the vacancies are deliberate. As a candidate, Trump promised to “cut so much your head will spin.” Amid a strong economy, large numbers of employees are opting to leave the government rather than serve it. In Trump’s first nine months, more than seventy-nine thousand full-time workers quit or retired—a forty-two-per-cent increase over that period in Obama’s Presidency. To Trump and his allies, the departures have been liberating, a purge of obstructionists. 

"Thus began the “spoils system,” in which a winning candidate dispensed most government jobs as gifts. It lasted until 1881, when President James Garfield was shot by a man who believed that he was due a diplomatic post as a reward for supporting Garfield’s campaign. In response, Congress created a civil service in which hiring was based on merit, in the belief that only a workforce free from political interference could earn public trust. To admirers, America’s civil service became the ballast in the ship of state, exemplified by the National Laboratories, Neil Armstrong, and generations of humble bureaucrats who banned unsafe medications, recalled defective motor vehicles, and monitored conditions at nursing homes. According to the Partnership for Public Service, the federal workforce has included at least sixty-nine winners of the Nobel Prize, most of them scientists with little public profile. All U.S. public servants are bound by an official code of ethics that demands “loyalty to . . . country above loyalty to persons, party or government department.”

"Advocates of limited government, Storrs notes, have long regarded the civil service as a “snivel service” of Ivy Leaguers, “a bureaucracy of short-haired women and long-haired men, bent on replacing the traditional American family.” In 1951, “Washington Confidential,” a best-seller by two journalists working for the conservative press mogul William Randolph Hearst, presented the civil service as a domain of “mediocrity and virtual anonymity,” in a city of “economic parasites.”

"Veteran U.S. diplomats say that the State Department is in its most diminished condition since the nineteen-fifties, when McCarthy called it a hotbed of “Communists and queers” and vowed to root out the “prancing mimics of the Moscow party line.” McEldowney, the retired Ambassador, said, “I believe to the depth of my being that by undermining our diplomatic capability we are putting our country at risk. Something awful is inevitably going to happen, and people will ask, ‘Where are the diplomats?’ And the tragic answer will have to be ‘We got rid of them in a fire sale.’ ”

1491

1491 by Charles C. Mann in The Atlantic, March 2002. One of my favorite articles of all time.

"Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact."

"The Micmac scoffed at the notion of French superiority. If Christian civilization was so wonderful, why were its inhabitants leaving?"

"As for the Indians, evidence suggests that they often viewed Europeans with disdain. The Hurons, a chagrined missionary reported, thought the French possessed "little intelligence in comparison to themselves." Europeans, Indians said, were physically weak, sexually untrustworthy, atrociously ugly, and just plain dirty. (Spaniards, who seldom if ever bathed, were amazed by the Aztec desire for personal cleanliness.)"

"The Earth Shall Weep, James Wilson's history of Indian America, puts the comparison bluntly: "the western hemisphere was larger, richer, and more populous than Europe."

EO Wilson quote

“The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.” 
― Edward O. Wilson

The Agent (about Ali Soufan) by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, July 2006

The Agent (about Ali Soufan) by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, July 2006.  Read this as I was watching the new Hulu mini-series, "The Looming Tower" based on Wright's Pulitzer-winning book about "Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."

Soldiers Have Used Drugs to Enhance Their Killing Capabilities in Basically Every War

Soldiers Have Used Drugs to Enhance Their Killing Capabilities in Basically Every War by Oscar Rickett, writing for Vice News, April 2016.

In his new book 'Shooting Up,' the Polish historian Lukasz Kamienski traces the history of drugs in warfare, from the Viking berserkers to the Mumbai attacks.

"In the 1980s, the military historian John Keegan responded to the question, "Why do soldiers fight?" with three answers: "inducement, coercion, narcosis." While Keegan later decided this theory was too simple, Kamienski argues that, on top of the inducement provided by dehumanizing training regimes and the coercion that sees nations force people to fight in their name, "narcosis" can be read literally: in order to kill other people, human beings need to put themselves in a different frame of mind. Drugs can make soldiers do things they otherwise never would: leave their humanity behind and becoming the fighting apparatus of an army."

The Things That Carried Him: The award-winning true story behind one soldier's last trip home.

The Things That Carried Him by Chris Jones writing in Esquire, August 2010.

Great creative non-fiction about the process of bringing home fallen soldiers.

The Ancient Myth of ‘Good Fences’ (Ancient Greeks' view of foreigners)

The Ancient Myth of ‘Good Fences’ by Ingrid Rossellini in The New York Times,  May 2018

In Ancient Greece, where a profound appreciation of human reason produced a brilliant civilization, pernicious biases were also established. Women were assumed to be guided by passions rather than rationality, and so they were considered inferior to men and excluded from the cultural and political life of the city-state. As the word “virtue” — from the Latin “vir,” meaning “man” — so clearly expresses, the ethos that Greek as well as Roman culture fostered derived from a military and patriarchal mentality. The “fence” of bigotry and prejudice that prevent the flourishing in public life of half the population certainly hobbled the development of Greek and Roman society.

The Greeks held similarly disparaging views toward foreigners, called “barbarians” because they seemed to say “bar-bar-bar” when they spoke. The Greek word “logos,” which simultaneously indicated “language” and “rationality,” gave further validation to that premise: Those who did not share the Greek idiom were viewed as inferior Others who lacked the intellectual talents that had made possible the free and self-ruled society that the Greek polis represented.

With the rise of Islam, the Other came to be represented by the Muslims, whose rapid territorial expansion (which included cities that had been important centers of Greek and Latin culture) struck fear in the very heart of Europe.

To foster the righteous spirit of the Crusaders, Christian art depicted Muslims with monstrous traits suggesting they were closer to animals than human beings. But the humiliating defeat that the “infidels” dealt to the Crusaders turned out to be an unexpected gift: the Christian world, having come into contact with the Muslim intelligentsia, rediscovered its own cultural roots — the classical heritage that eventually led to the blooming of the Renaissance.

How to change the course of human history

How to change the course of human history by David Graeber and David Wengrow in EuroZine, March 2018.

The story we have been telling ourselves about our origins is wrong, and perpetuates the idea of inevitable social inequality. David Graeber and David Wengrow ask why the myth of 'agricultural revolution' remains so persistent, and argue that there is a whole lot more we can learn from our ancestors.

"A wider look at the archaeological evidence suggests a key to resolving the dilemma. It lies in the seasonal rhythms of prehistoric social life. Most of the Palaeolithic sites discussed so far are associated with evidence for annual or biennial periods of aggregation, linked to the migrations of game herds – whether woolly mammoth, steppe bison, reindeer or (in the case of Göbekli Tepe) gazelle – as well as cyclical fish-runs and nut harvests. At less favourable times of year, at least some of our Ice Age ancestors no doubt really did live and forage in tiny bands. But there is overwhelming evidence to show that at others they congregated en masse within the kind of ‘micro-cities’ found at Dolní Věstonice, in the Moravian basin south of Brno, feasting on a super-abundance of wild resources, engaging in complex rituals, ambitious artistic enterprises, and trading minerals, marine shells, and animal pelts over striking distances.

....The pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we’re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place. 

Articles on James Mattis (Defense Secretary) and H. R. McMaster (Nat'l. Security Advisor)

Both from The New Yorker:

James Mattis, A Warrior in Washington by Dexter Filkins, asks "The former Marine Corps general spent four decades on the front lines. How will he lead the Department of Defense?" in March 2018.

For Trump, the choice of Mattis seemed more emotional than deliberative. Their initial meeting lasted just forty minutes, and Trump seemed drawn to him less for his world view than for his fearsome reputation. Announcing his nomination for Secretary of Defense, Trump revelled in using the general’s nickname—Mad Dog—and compared him to General George S. Patton, who was famous for his tactical brilliance, his profane language, and his merciless style. Anecdotes about Mattis’s audacity in the field are legion. Early in the Iraq War, he met with local leaders and told them, “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fuck with me, I will kill you all.” 

But, in embracing Mattis’s Mad Dog persona, Trump neglected a side of him that appealed to many others—that of the deeply read scholar-soldier and sophisticated analyst. In this view, Mattis is a kind of anti-Trump, a veteran of three wars who has been sobered by their brutalities, a guardian of the internationalist tradition in American foreign policy. Mattis was endorsed by Henry Kissinger, whom he had worked with at Stanford University. As if to prove his judiciousness, Mattis, during his job interview, tried to persuade Trump to abandon the idea of reinstituting torture as an interrogation tool, saying that offers of beer and cigarettes work just as well. Even the nickname Mad Dog is a misnomer; none of his friends use it, and Mattis himself does not care for it.

McMaster and Commander by Patrick Radden Keefe, asks "Can a national-security adviser retain his integrity if the President has none?" in April 2018.

Two days after Trump’s phone call with Putin, he fired McMaster. Someone in the Administration had leaked the “do not congratulate” story to the Washington Post, and Trump was furious. Yet McMaster’s ouster had seemed imminent for months. As it turned out, Trump found the intellectual side of the warrior-intellectual annoying. When McMaster took the job, he had promised to “work tirelessly” to protect “the interests of the American people,” but the challenges he faced were unprecedented. What does it mean to be the national-security adviser when some of the greatest threats confronting the nation may be the proclivities and limitations of the President himself? McMaster’s friend Eliot Cohen, who was a senior official in the George W. Bush Administration, told me that, although they have not spoken about the general’s motives, he thinks McMaster may have believed that he was “defending the country, to some extent, from the President.” 

McMaster is “not apologetic about America’s greatness,” one of his N.S.C. colleagues told me. Several of them suggested that, to the degree that one can discern a foreign-policy world view in Trump’s sloganeering, it is not very different from McMaster’s. Unlike Trump, McMaster respects international alliances and sees value in protracted troop deployments, but both men regard the world as a dangerous arena in which the U.S. should not be afraid to exert its will. There is a practiced flair to McMaster’s erudition, and in speeches and conversations he relies on a store of quotations from theorists and generals, from Clausewitz to Stonewall Jackson. Invoking Thucydides, he has suggested that peace is merely “an armistice in a war that is continuously going on.”

Palantir Knows Everything About You by Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, and Jordan Robertson in Bloomberg, April 2018

Palantir Knows Everything About You by Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, and Jordan Robertson in Bloomberg, April 2018.

Tapping databases of driver’s license and ID photos, law enforcement agencies can now identify more than half the population of U.S. adults.

Founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and some fellow PayPal alumni, Palantir cut its teeth working for the Pentagon and the CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq. The company’s engineers and products don’t do any spying themselves; they’re more like a spy’s brain, collecting and analyzing information that’s fed in from the hands, eyes, nose, and ears. The software combs through disparate data sources—financial documents, airline reservations, cellphone records, social media postings—and searches for connections that human analysts might miss. It then presents the linkages in colorful, easy-to-interpret graphics that look like spider webs. U.S. spies and special forces loved it immediately; they deployed Palantir to synthesize and sort the blizzard of battlefield intelligence. It helped planners avoid roadside bombs, track insurgents for assassination, even hunt down Osama bin Laden. The military success led to federal contracts on the civilian side. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services uses Palantir to detect Medicare fraud. The FBI uses it in criminal probes. The Department of Homeland Security deploys it to screen air travelers and keep tabs on immigrants.

Design Thinking Is a Boondoggle

Design Thinking Is a Boondoggle by Lee Vinsel in The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2018.

But significant change in art, technology, science, and culture starts by building on what has come before, not by throwing it away. In jazz, Bird, Coltrane, and Herbie Hancock all spent years understanding the tradition — thousands of hours of listening and practice — before making their own breakthroughs. In computer programming, there is an idea called "Chesterton’s fence," "the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood."

What they cleverly illustrate is that design thinking is the act of taking ideas that already exist, sexing them up with a bit of rouge, and putting them in other words. Typically, people with a bad case of the DTs do this without knowing they’re doing it — this is called "innovation." The historians David Edgerton and Will Thomas have argued that by eliding whole traditions of thought, such bogus novelty claims actually produce ignorance.

Design thinkers and the UIF teach a thoroughly adolescent conception of culture.

Edmund Burke once wrote, "You had all of these advantages … but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you." The brain-rotting illness of innovation-speak leads us to see everything around us as objects in our way, and to overvalue our own uniqueness.

It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read

It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read by Charles Chu in Medium.com, August 2017.

“For example, reading and experience are usually “compiled” at the time they happen, using the state of your brain at that time. The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times.

“A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.” -Nassim Taleb

When something leaps at me, there’s a good chance it’s important. So I make a note in the margin of the page. This is an act of conversation with the author, and the very act of doing so creates a connection in my mind which, in turn, updates the models in my head.

What we get from books is not just a collection of names, dates and events stored in our minds like files in a computer. Books also change, via our mental models, the very reality that we perceive.

Is There Any Point to Protesting? by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker, August 2017

Is There Any Point to Protesting? by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker, August 2017.

Tufekci suggests that the movements that succeed are actually proto-institutional: highly organized; strategically flexible, due to sinewy management structures; and chummy with the sorts of people we now call élites.

She calls this style of off-the-cuff organizing “adhocracy.” Once, just getting people to show up required top-down coördination, but today anyone can gather crowds through tweets, and update, in seconds, thousands of strangers on the move.

Why did civil-rights protest work where recent activism struggles?

The missing ingredients, Tufekci believes, are the structures and communication patterns that appear when a fixed group works together over time. That practice puts the oil in the well-oiled machine. It is what contemporary adhocracy appears to lack, and what projects such as the postwar civil-rights movement had in abundance. And it is why, she thinks, despite their limits in communication, these earlier protests often achieved more.

The White Flight of Derek Black

The white flight of Derek Black by Eli Saslow in The Washington Post, October 2016.

He learned that Western Europe had begun not as a great society of genetically superior people but as a technologically backward place that lagged behind Islamic culture. He studied the 8th century to the 12th century, trying to trace back the modern concepts of race and whiteness, but he couldn’t find them anywhere. “We basically just invented it,” he concluded.

There is no such thing as western civilisation by Kwame Anthony Appiah

There is no such thing as western civilisation by Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Guardian, November 2016.

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, the world was divided into three parts. To the east was Asia, to the south was a continent he called Libya, and the rest was Europe.

But here’s the important point: it would not have occurred to Herodotus to think that these three names corresponded to three kinds of people: Europeans, Asians, and Africans.

Herodotus only uses the word “European” as an adjective, never as a noun.

So, simply put, the very idea of a “European” was first used to contrast Christians and Muslims.

Now, nobody in medieval Europe would have used the word “western” for that job. For one thing, the coast of Morocco, home of the Moors, stretches west of Ireland. For another, there were Muslim rulers in the Iberian Peninsula – part of the continent that Herodotus called Europe – until nearly the 16th century. The natural contrast was not between Islam and the west, but between Christendom and Dar al‑Islam, each of which regarded the other as infidels, defined by their unbelief.

The idea that the best of the culture of Greece was passed by way of Rome into western Europe gradually became, in the middle ages, a commonplace. In fact this process had a name. It was called the “translatio studii”: the transfer of learning. And it was an astonishingly persistent idea. More than six centuries later, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the great German philosopher, told the students of the high school he ran in Nuremberg: “The foundation of higher study must be and remain Greek literature in the first place, Roman in the second.” So from the late middle ages until now, people have thought of the best in the culture of Greece and Rome as a civilisational inheritance, passed on like a precious golden nugget, dug out of the earth by the Greeks, transferred, when the Roman empire conquered them, to Rome. Partitioned between the Flemish and Florentine courts and the Venetian Republic in the Renaissance, its fragments passed through cities such as Avignon, Paris, Amsterdam, Weimar, Edinburgh and London, and were finally reunited – pieced together like the broken shards of a Grecian urn – in the academies of Europe and the United States.

Because the classical inheritance it identifies was shared with Muslim learning. In Baghdad of the ninth century Abbasid caliphate, the palace library featured the works of Plato and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Euclid, translated into Arabic. In the centuries that Petrarch called the Dark Ages, when Christian Europe made little contribution to the study of Greek classical philosophy, and many of the texts were lost, these works were preserved by Muslim scholars. Much of our modern understanding of classical philosophy among the ancient Greeks we have only because those texts were recovered by European scholars in the Renaissance from the Arabs.

the Muslims of al-Andalus, bellicose as they were, did not think that fighting for territory meant that you could not share ideas. By the end of the first millennium, the cities of the Caliphate of Cordoba were marked by the cohabitation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, of Berbers, Visigoths, Slavs and countless others.

The translation into Latin of the works of Ibn Rushd, born in Cordoba in the 12th century, began the European rediscovery of Aristotle. He was known in Latin as Averroes, or more commonly just as “The Commentator”, because of his commentaries on Aristotle. So the classical traditions that are meant to distinguish western civilisation from the inheritors of the caliphates are actually a point of kinship with them.

Cosmopolitanism: How To Be a Citizen of the World

Cosmopolitanism: How To Be a Citizen of the World by Julian Brookes in Mother Jones, an interview with Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah in February 2006.

What’s distinctive about the cosmopolitan attitude is that it comes with a recognition that encounters with other people aren’t about making them like us. Cosmopolitans accept and indeed like the fact that people live in different ways; that free human beings will choose to live in different ways and will choose to express themselves in different ways. And that openness to difference comes, I think, from a kind of toleration combined with a recognition of human fallibility. One of the reasons why we’re glad there are people out there who aren’t like us is that we’re pretty certain that there are a lot of things we’re wrong about.

Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are By David McCullough

Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are by David McCullough, April 2005

There was a wonderful professor of child psychology at the University of Pittsburgh named Margaret McFarland who was so wise that I wish her teachings and her ideas and her themes were much better known. She said that attitudes aren’t taught, they’re caught. If the teacher has an attitude of enthusiasm for the subject, the student catches that whether the student is in second grade or is in graduate school. She said that if you show them what you love, they’ll get it and they’ll want to get it.

History isn’t just something that ought to be taught or ought to be read or ought to be encouraged because it’s going to make us a better citizen. It will make us a better citizen; or because it will make us a more thoughtful and understanding human being, which it will; or because it will cause us to behave better, which it will. It should be taught for pleasure: The pleasure of history, like art or music or literature, consists of an expansion of the experience of being alive, which is what education is largely about.

Nobody lived in the past, if you stop to think about it. Jefferson, Adams, Washington – they didn’t walk around saying, “Isn’t this fascinating, living in the past?” They lived in the present just as we do. The difference was it was their present, not ours. And just as we don’t know how things are going to turn out for us, they didn’t either.

An old friend, the late Daniel Boorstin, who was a very good historian and Librarian of Congress, said that trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers.

YOU ARE THE PRODUCT by John Lancaster on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg

YOU ARE THE PRODUCT by John Lancaster, London Review of Books, August 2017.

Facebook’s mission used to be ‘making the world more open and connected’. A non-Facebooker reading that is likely to ask: why? Connection is presented as an end in itself, an inherently and automatically good thing. Is it, though? Flaubert was sceptical about trains because he thought (in Julian Barnes’s paraphrase) that ‘the railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid.’ You don’t have to be as misanthropic as Flaubert to wonder if something similar isn’t true about connecting people on Facebook. For instance, Facebook is generally agreed to have played a big, perhaps even a crucial, role in the election of Donald Trump. The benefit to humanity is not clear.

The Fragile Generation by Jonathan Haidt

The Fragile Generation by Jonathan Haidt in Spiked Review, September 2017.

On the crisis of resilience on campus....

The heightened vulnerability of college students has had a chilling effect on discussion in the academic world, and Haidt sees this in his day-to-day experience on campus. ‘There is a rapidly spreading feeling that we are all walking on eggshells, both students and faculty. That we are now accountable, not for what we say, but for how anyone who hears it might take it. And if you have to speak, thinking about the worst reading that anyone could put on your words, that means you cannot be provocative, you cannot take risks, that means you will play it safe when you speak… This is what I’m seeing in my classes when topics related to race or gender come up – which we used to be able to talk about 10 years ago, but now it’s painful and there’s a lot of silence.’ This is disastrous for academic life, as Haidt points out: ‘A university cannot function if people will not put their ideas forth, will not contest ideas that they think are wrong, will not stand up for ideas that they think are right.’

The Fall of Rome: Facts and Fictions by Mark Damen

The Fall of Rome: Facts and Fictions by Mark Damen, a course lecture

WHY I’M GIVING UP ON PREVENTATIVE CARE by Barbara Ehrenreich

WHY I’M  GIVING UP ON PREVENTATIVE CARE by Barbara Ehrenreich in Literary Hub, April 2018

One reason for the compulsive urge to test and screen and monitor is profit, and this is especially true in the United States, with its heavily private and often for-profit health system. How is a doctor—or hospital or drug company—to make money from essentially healthy patients? By subjecting them to tests and examinations that, in sufficient quantity, are bound to detect something wrong or at least worthy of follow-up. Gilbert and his coauthors offer a vivid analogy, borrowed from an expert in fractal geometry: “How many islands surround Britain’s coasts?” The answer of course depends on the resolution of the map you are using, as well as how you are defining an “island.” With high-resolution technologies like CT scans, the detection of tiny abnormalities is almost inevitable, leading to ever more tests, prescriptions, and doctor visits. And the tendency to over-test is amplified when the doctor who recommends the tests has a financial interest in the screening or imaging facility that he or she refers people to.

Millenials Are Screwed, Huffington Post (December 2017)

Millenials Are Screwed by Michael Hobbes, Huffington Post (December 2017)

Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.

And so the real reason millennials can’t seem to achieve the adulthood our parents envisioned for us is that we’re trying to succeed within a system that no longer makes any sense. Homeownership and migration have been pitched to us as gateways to prosperity because, back when the boomers grew up, they were. But now, the rules have changed and we’re left playing a game that is impossible to win.We start earning less money, later. We have more debt and higher rent.Which means we aren’t able to save.Which means we can’t buy a house or prepare for retirement.Which means that unless something changes…All of us are headed for a very dark place. 

This is what it feels like to be young now. Not only are we screwed, but we have to listen to lectures about our laziness and our participation trophies from the people who screwed us.

In Praise of A.D.H.D. (and its connection to exploration)

In Praise of A.D.H.D. by Leonard Mlodinow, New York Times, March 2018

Individuals with A.D.H.D. naturally have less stringent filters. This can make them more distractible but also more creative. Such individuals may also adapt well to frequent change and thus make for good explorers. Jews whose ancestors migrated north to Rome and Germany from what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories show a higher proportion of the A.D.H.D. gene variant than those Jews whose ancestors migrated a shorter distance south to Ethiopia and Yemen. In fact, scientists have found that the farther a group’s ancestors migrated, the higher the prevalence of the gene variant in that population.Or consider the case of the Ariaal, a Kenyan tribe whose members through most of its history were wild-animal herders. A few decades ago, some of its members split off from the main group and became farmers.Being a wild-animal herder is a good job if you are naturally restless; subsistence farming is a far tamer occupation. Recently, the anthropologist Dan Eisenberg and collaborators studied whether people with A.D.H.D. might thrive in the former lifestyle but suffer in the latter. They found that among the herders, those who possessed a gene that predisposed them to A.D.H.D. were, on average, better nourished. Among the farming Ariaal, the opposite was true: Those who lacked the genetic predisposition for A.D.H.D. were, on average, better nourished. Restlessness seemed to better suit a restless existence.

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? by Jean Twenge in The Atlantic, September 2017

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

"[T]heirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones..."

Electronic devices and social media seem to have an especially strong ability to disrupt sleep.

social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out.

Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide

The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression

But at the generational level, when teens spend more time on smartphones and less time on in-person social interactions, loneliness is more common.

Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.

Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.

Today’s teens are also less likely to date.

But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents.

Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011.

More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been.

The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health.

She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

Jeff Sessions is Killing Civil Rights

Jeff Sessions is Killing Civil Rights by Vann Newkirk II in The Atlantic, June 2018

Rather, from the Black Belt in Alabama in the 1980s to the farthest reaches of the border fence today, the Sessions Doctrine is the endgame of a long legal tradition of undermining minority civil rights.

Sessions has recently pushed for changes in the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the immigration-court system embedded within the DOJ. He’s considering ways to force judges to process more deportation cases, changes that several experts say will undoubtedly mean that fewer people receive due process or fair hearings.

The attorney general has also moved to firmly limit asylum grants, and last week announced that he could effectively eliminate the ability of immigrants who face domestic or gang violence back home to successfully apply for asylum.

Sessions successfully pushed Trump to end the Obama “catch and release” policy, under which unverified immigrants arrested in the immigration dragnet were let go before trial, and has enforced the “zero tolerance” policy in its place, one detaining all arrested immigrants pending trial.

Sessions made clear he believed that so-called sanctuary cities and unverified immigrants had essentially imported the opioid problem into the U.S. In retaliation for such cities’ continued refusal to enforce strict federal immigration detentions and referrals, Sessions has fought to strip them of certain avenues of federal-grant funding.

In rescinding former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates’s private-prison memo, Sessions did not mention the OIG’s report, or any of the allegations of brutality and misconduct in private prisons. He merely stated that the policy “impaired the Bureau’s ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system.”

According to Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division from 2014 to 2017, the pace and extent of retrenchment under the first year of Sessions’s tenure have been extraordinary. “This DOJ and Jeff Sessions are rolling back civil-rights progress and undermining fundamental American values of equality and justice in a fairly unprecedented manner,” Gupta told me. “Across every issue, from criminal-justice reform to voting rights to LGBTQ rights, the attorney general is advancing a vision of America that is narrow, and abdicating some of the Justice Department’s core responsibilities and mandate to ensure equal rights and access to justice for all.”

As the state’s attorney general, he pushed an expansive capital-punishment agenda, fighting to execute some intellectually disabled people.

Sessions supported a failed bill to execute people who received two or more serious drug offenses. And as a ProPublica investigation chronicles, while the state attorney general, Sessions also fought a long legal battle against a court order seeking to equalize funding for Alabama’s still-segregated schools.

Joe and the Whale

Joe and the Whale by Chelsea Murray in The Deep, June 2018

Joe Howlett gave his life to save an animal that may already be past the point of no return. After ten centuries of annihilation, is there any way to undo the damage done?

The cult of Mary Beard, by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian (January 2018)

The cult of Mary Beard, by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian (January 2018)

"Beard’s view, in other words, is that it is fruitless to make ancient sources into a kind of window through which, if you try hard enough, you will be able to discern a clear picture of the classical world – which has been the traditional means of doing classics. The sources themselves – the original texts and artefacts, as well as the accretions of later scholarship – combine to create our view of the past, and they can be unpicked so that they offer up clues about the anxieties and worldview that formed them. When she, with her co-writer John Henderson, first put such ideas forward in A Very Short Introduction to Classics (1995), it was surprising and fresh to read not that classics was about discovering what Greece and Rome were “really like”. Instead, they wrote, “classics exists in that gap between us and the world of the Greeks and the Romans”.

Simplicity by William Zinsser

http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/wclement/Writing/zinsser.html

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. The airline pilot who wakes us to announce that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable weather wouldn't dream of saying that there's a storm ahead and it may get bumpy. The sentence is too simple - there must be something wrong with it. 

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb which carries the same meaning that is already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what - these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur, ironically, in proportion to education and rank."

Paul Manafort, American Hustler: The Plot Against America, by Franklin Foer in The Atlantic, March 2018

Paul Manafort, American Hustler: The Plot Against America, by Franklin Foer in The Atlantic, March 2018.  Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

"One venture would run campaigns; the other would turn around and lobby the politicians whom their colleagues had helped elect. The consulting side hired the hard-edged operative Lee Atwater, notorious for pioneering race-baiting tactics on behalf of Strom Thurmond. “We’re getting into servicing what we sell,” Atwater told his friends. Just as imagined, the firm’s political clients (Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, Arlen Specter) became reliable warhorses when the firm needed them to promote the agendas of its corporate clients. With this evolution of the profession, the effectiveness and influence of lobbying grew in tandem."

The Case Against Perfection by Michael Sandel

The Case Against Perfection by Michael Sandel in The Atlantic, April 2004

To acknowledge the giftedness of life is to recognize that our talents and powers are not wholly our own doing, despite the effort we expend to develop and to exercise them. It is also to recognize that not everything in the world is open to whatever use we may desire or devise. Appreciating the gifted quality of life constrains the Promethean project and conduces to a certain humility. It is in part a religious sensibility. But its resonance reaches beyond religion.

It is more plausible to view genetic engineering as the ultimate expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature. But that promise of mastery is flawed. It threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift, and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will.

Why humans need to rethink their place in the animal kingdom (book review in The New Statesman)

Why humans need to rethink their place in the animal kingdom (book review in The New Statesman)

Most of our science, philosophy and religion starts from the assumption that there are humans and there are  animals – and there could never at any point be any common ground between them. To call someone an animal is as bad an insult as you can offer, and yet we’re all mammals. For centuries, the notion of human uniqueness was the most fundamental orthodoxy. Now it is being challenged. Book after book ventures into the no-man’s-land – the no-animal’s-land – that lies between our species and the other ten million or so in the animal kingdom. As often as not, they reveal more of ourselves than of our fellow animals.

Lucy Cooke, The Unexpected Truth About Animals

Peter Wohlleben, The Inner Life of Animals

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses

A journey through a land of extreme poverty: welcome to America, by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian

A journey through a land of extreme poverty: welcome to America, by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian (December 2017)

It began on the day that Republicans in the US Senate voted for sweeping tax cuts that will deliver a bonanza for the super wealthy while in time raising taxes on many lower-income families. The changes will exacerbate wealth inequality that is already the most extreme in any industrialized nation, with three men – Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet – owning as much as half of the entire American people.

Frozen Alive by Peter Stark in Outside Magazine

https://www.outsideonline.com/2152131/freezing-death

INSIDE TRUMP’S CRUEL CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE U.S.D.A.’S SCIENTISTS by Michael Lewis

INSIDE TRUMP’S CRUEL CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE U.S.D.A.’S SCIENTISTS by Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair, November 2017

"One day in his new job he was handed the budget for the Department of Agriculture. “I was like, Oh yeah, the U.S.D.A.—they give money to farmers to grow stuff.” For the first time he looked closely at what this arm of the United States government actually does. Its very name is seriously misleading—most of what it does has little to do with agriculture. It runs 193 million acres of national forest and grasslands, for instance. It is charged with inspecting almost all the animals people eat, including the nine billion birds a year. Buried inside it is a massive science program; a bank with $220 billion in assets; plus a large fleet of aircraft for firefighting. It monitors catfish farms. It maintains a shooting range inside its D.C. headquarters. It keeps an apiary on its roof, to study bee-colony collapse. A small fraction of its massive annual budget ($164 billion in 2016) was actually spent on farmers, but it financed and managed all these programs in rural America—including the free school lunch for kids living near the poverty line. “I’m sitting there looking at this,” said Ali. “The U.S.D.A. had subsidized the apartment my family had lived in. The hospital we used. The fire department. The town’s water. The electricity. It had paid for the food I had eaten.”

"More than a month after the election, the Trump transition team finally appeared. But it wasn’t a team: it was just one guy, named Brian Klippenstein. He came from his job running an organization called Protect the Harvest. Protect the Harvest was founded by a Trump supporter, an Indiana oilman and rancher named Forrest Lucas. Its stated purpose was “to protect your right to hunt, fish, farm, eat meat, and own animals.” In practice it mainly demonized organizations, like the Humane Society, that sought to prevent people who owned animals from doing terrible things to them. They worried, apparently, that if people were forced to be kind to animals they might one day cease to eat them. “This is a weird group,” says Rachael Bale, who writes often about animal welfare for National Geographic. One of the U.S.D.A.’s many duties was to police conflicts between people and animals. It brought legal action against people who abused animals, and so maybe it wasn’t the ideal place to insert a man who was preternaturally unconcerned with their welfare. The department maintained its composure—no nasty leaks to the press, no resignations in protest—even as Klippenstein focused, bizarrely, on a single issue. Not animal abuse but climate change. “He came in and wanted to know all about the office on climate change,” says a former U.S.D.A. employee. “That’s what he wanted to focus on. He wanted the names of the people doing the work.” 

"Into U.S.D.A. jobs, some of which paid nearly $80,000 a year, the Trump team had inserted a long-haul truck driver, a clerk at AT&T, a gas-company meter reader, a country-club cabana attendant, a Republican National Committee intern, and the owner of a scented-candle company, with skills like “pleasant demeanor” listed on their résumés. “In many cases [the new appointees] demonstrated little to no experience with federal policy, let alone deep roots in agriculture,” wrote Hopkinson. “Some of those appointees appear to lack the credentials, such as a college degree, required to qualify for higher government salaries.” What these people had in common, she pointed out, was loyalty to Donald Trump.

"By the time she left the little box marked “Rural Development,” Lillian Salerno had spent the better part of five years inside it. The box’s function was simple: to channel low-interest-rate loans, along with a few grants, mainly to towns with fewer than 50,000 people in them. Her department ran the $220 billion bank that serviced the poorest of the poor in rural America: in the Deep South, and in the tribal lands, and in the communities, called colonias, along the U.S.-Mexico border. “Some of the communities in the South, the only checks going in are government checks,” she said.

"As the U.S.D.A.’s loans were usually made through local banks, the people on the receiving end of them were often unaware of where the money was coming from. There were many stories very like the one Tom Vilsack told, about a loan they had made, in Minnesota, to a government-shade-throwing, Fox News-watching, small-town businessman. The bank held a ceremony and the guy wound up being interviewed by the local paper. “He’s telling the reporter how proud he is to have done it on his own,” said Vilsack. “The U.S.D.A. person goes to introduce herself, and he says, ‘So who are you?’ She says, ‘I’m the U.S.D.A. person.’ He asks, ‘What are you doing here?’ She says, ‘Well, sir, we supplied the money you are announcing.’ He was white as a sheet.”"

"She’d come to her job inside the little box marked “Rural Development” without any particular ambition to be there. The sums of money at her disposal were incredible: the little box gave out or guaranteed $30 billion in loans and grants a year. But people who should have known about it hadn’t the first clue what it was up to. “I had this conversation with elected and state officials almost everywhere in the South,” said Salerno. “Them: We hate the government and you suck. Me: My mission alone put $1 billion into your economy this year, so are you sure about that? Me thinking: We are the only reason your shitty state is standing.”"

"But the more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump. So you might think that Trump, when he took office, would do everything he could to strengthen and grow the little box marked “Rural Development.” That’s not what has happened."

The sugar conspiracy by Ian Leslie in The Guardian, April 2016

The sugar conspiracy by Ian Leslie in The Guardian, April 2016

"But, as Gary Taubes puts it, obese people are not fat because they are overeating and sedentary – they are overeating and sedentary because they are fat, or getting fatter."

"In his new book, Always Hungry, David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, calls this the “Insulin-Carbohydrate” model of obesity. According to this model, an excess of refined carbohydrates interferes with the self-balancing equilibrium of the metabolic system."

"Biochemists and endocrinologists are more likely to think of obesity as a hormonal disorder, triggered by the kinds of foods we started eating a lot more of when we cut back on fat: easily digestible starches and sugars."

"Gary Taubes is a physicist by background. “In physics,” he told me, “You look for the anomalous result. Then you have something to explain. In nutrition, the game is to confirm what you and your predecessors have always believed.”

Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India by Sujatha Gidla

Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India by Sujatha Gidla

Excerpted in the Boston Review, July 2017

"When people in this country ask me what it means to be an untouchable, I explain that caste is like racism against blacks here. But then they ask, “How does anyone know what your caste is?” They know caste isn’t visible, like skin color. I explain it like this. In Indian villages and towns, everyone knows everyone else. Each caste has its own special role and its own place to live. The brahmins (who perform priestly functions), the potters, the blacksmiths, the carpenters, the washer people, and so on—they each have their own separate place to live within the village. The untouchables, whose special role—whose hereditary duty—is to labor in the fields of others or to do other work that Hindu society considers filthy, are not allowed to live in the village at all. They must live outside the boundaries of the village proper. They are not allowed to enter temples. Not allowed to come near sources of drinking water used by other castes. Not allowed to eat sitting next to a caste Hindu or to use the same utensils. There are thousands of other such restrictions and indignities that vary from place to place. Every day in an Indian newspaper you can read of an untouchable beaten or killed for wearing sandals, for riding a bicycle. In your own town or village, everyone already knows your caste; there is no escaping it. But how do people know your caste when you go elsewhere, to a place where no one knows you? There they will ask you, “What caste are you?” You cannot avoid this question. And you cannot refuse to answer. By tradition, everyone has the right to know. If you are educated like me, if you don’t seem like a typical untouchable, then you have a choice. You can tell the truth and be ostracized, ridiculed, harassed—even driven to suicide, as happens regularly in universities. Or you can lie. If they don’t believe you, they will try to find out your true caste some other way. They may ask you certain questions: “Did your brother ride a horse at his wedding? Did his wife wear a red sari or a white sari? How does she wear her sari? Do you eat beef? Who is your family deity?” They may even seek the opinion of someone from your region. If you get them to believe your lie, then of course you cannot tell them your stories, your family’s stories. You cannot tell them about your life. It would reveal your caste. Because your life is your caste, your caste is your life."

Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League

Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League by William Dereksiewicz in The New Republic, July 2014

"So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk. You have no margin for error, so you avoid the possibility that you will ever make an error. Once, a student at Pomona told me that she’d love to have a chance to think about the things she’s studying, only she doesn’t have the time. I asked her if she had ever considered not trying to get an A in every class. She looked at me as if I had made an indecent suggestion."

"College is not the only chance to learn to think, but it is the best. One thing is certain: If you haven’t started by the time you finish your B.A., there’s little likelihood you’ll do it later. That is why an undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career preparation is four years largely wasted."

"Is there anything that I can do, a lot of young people have written to ask me, to avoid becoming an out-of-touch, entitled little shit? I don’t have a satisfying answer, short of telling them to transfer to a public university. You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds, still less to knowledge of them. You need to interact with them directly, and it has to be on an equal footing: not in the context of “service,” and not in the spirit of “making an effort,” either—swooping down on a member of the college support staff and offering to “buy them a coffee,” as a former Yalie once suggested, in order to “ask them about themselves.”

"If there is one idea, above all, through which the concept of social responsibility is communicated at the most prestigious schools, it is “leadership.” “Harvard is for leaders,” goes the Cambridge cliché. To be a high-achieving student is to constantly be urged to think of yourself as a future leader of society. But what these institutions mean by leadership is nothing more than getting to the top. Making partner at a major law firm or becoming a chief executive, climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy you decide to attach yourself to. I don’t think it occurs to the people in charge of elite colleges that the concept of leadership ought to have a higher meaning, or, really, any meaning.

"Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive."

Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health by Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, July/August 2018

Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health by Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, July/August 2018.  In Baltimore and other segregated cities, the life-expectancy gap between African-Americans and whites is as much as 20 years. One young woman’s struggle shows why.

"But it is also a bigger story, of how African Americans became stuck in profoundly unhealthy neighborhoods, and of how the legacy of racism can literally take years off their lives. Far from being a relic of the past, America’s racist and segregationist history continues to harm black people in the most intimate of ways—seeping into their lungs, their blood, even their DNA."

To Be An Immigrant in Trump's America: A Theory of Animals by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

To Be An Immigrant in Trump's America: A Theory of Animals by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jezebel, June 2018.

"But among young Latinx immigrants, after the Trump comments went viral, there was some radical reclaiming of the word “animal” that piqued my interest. In particular, there was a video of a fifth-grade girl whose father was deported and who gave an impassioned speech in which she said, “The president says Mexican immigrants are animals. We are not animals! But if I was, I’d be a black panther, fighting against racism and inequality!” The crowd roared."

The Ultimate Guide to Intermittent Fasting by Katie Heaney

The Ultimate Guide to Intermittent Fasting by Katie Heaney, The Cut, June 2018

"Sears suggests a 14/10 fasting-to-eating ratio — meaning you’d eat over a ten-hour period (say, between the hours of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m.), and fast the rest of the time, for example. That way you can still have a social life, and still function at work, while getting all the benefits time-restricted eating provides."

Think Before You Give: Charity Should Be More Rational and Less Emotional by Maarten Boudry

Think Before You Give: Charity Should Be More Rational and Less Emotional by Maarten Boudry, Areo, September 2017.

"The Harvard economist Michael Kremer used the gold standard of scientific research, a randomized trial, to examine the effectiveness of a variety of programs that were intended to raise education standards in developing countries.What would be the best way to improve children’s education?You can probably come up with a few ideas: more books, better classroom equipment, more teachers per 100 children.All pretty obvious.And if those things don’t help much, they certainly can’t do any harm, right? Surprisingly, Kremer’s study showed that none of those “obvious” remedies improved the children’s school results.After a great deal of research, he found — to his surprise — that the one intervention that made far more difference than anything else was deworming.It turns out that the effects of parasitic worm infection are the number one cause of school absences in many developing countries.A simple deworming program typically reduces absence by 25%.But without careful scientific research into the effectiveness of various programs, we would probably never have discovered this.Instead, we would have had our heartstrings tugged by yet more pictures of classrooms full of children without books or pencils, and we’d have put our hands in our pockets to send case after case of learning materials, and they would have been placed on the empty desks of children who were too sick to come to school."

The Tyranny of the Ideal interview with philosopher Jerry Gaus

The Tyranny of the Ideal interview with philosopher Jerry Gaus in 3:AM, July 2016. 

"If the system is moderately complex and our intervention is a radical attempt to bring about a new order, then we are almost certain to get it wrong, with a good chance of bringing about disaster."

See also this article in the New York Times, (June 11, 2015): "The Virtues of Political Disagreement"

Aches and Pains by Austin Baraki

Aches and Pains by Austin Baraki, Starting Strength, July 2016.

"In fact, MRI appearance seems to have no predictive value at all for future pain or disability – even worse, just undergoing an MRI appears to be an independent risk factor .... In other words, just learning that your MRI shows ominous spinal “degeneration” is enough to make your pain worse and last longer. This fascinating phenomenon is known as the nocebo effect, and it fits perfectly in line with the biopsychosocial model where the brain has ultimate control over your perception of musculoskeletal pain."

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will by Steven Cave, The Atlantic, June 2016

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will by Steven Cave, The Atlantic, June 2016.

"Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion." 

"When asked to take a math test, with cheating made easy, the group primed to see free will as illusory proved more likely to take an illicit peek at the answers. When given an opportunity to steal—to take more money than they were due from an envelope of $1 coins—those whose belief in free will had been undermined pilfered more. On a range of measures, Vohs told me, she and Schooler found that “people who are induced to believe less in free will are more likely to behave immorally.” 

"The list goes on: Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side."  

"Smilansky advocates a view he calls illusionism—the belief that free will is indeed an illusion, but one that society must defend. The idea of determinism, and the facts supporting it, must be kept confined within the ivory tower."  

"Whereas the evidence from Kathleen Vohs and her colleagues suggests that social problems may arise from seeing our own actions as determined by forces beyond our control—weakening our morals, our motivation, and our sense of the meaningfulness of life—Harris thinks that social benefits will result from seeing other people’s behavior in the very same light." 

"Some scholars argue that we should think about freedom of choice in terms of our very real and sophisticated abilities to map out multiple potential responses to a particular situation. One of these is Bruce Waller, a philosophy professor at Youngstown State University. In his new book, Restorative Free Will, he writes that we should focus on our ability, in any given setting, to generate a wide range of options for ourselves, and to decide among them without external constraint." 

NYTimes book review of "Free Will" by Sam Harris